William Wheaton
William Rufus Wheaton (born May 7, 1814 in New York City , New York , † September 11, 1888 in San Francisco , California ) was an American lawyer , politician and baseball pioneer .
life and career
William Wheaton was born on May 7, 1814 in New York City, New York State, where he grew up and attended, among other things, the now defunct Union Hall Academy on the corner of Madison Avenue and Oliver Street. He then started a career as a lawyer by studying law with John Leveridge, a renowned lawyer from the East Side, and graduating in 1836. Wheaton was later admitted to practice with Reuben H. Walworth , the chancellor of the Supreme Court of New York State from 1828 to 1847 , before the State of New York officially abolished this office and the Supreme Court with a new constitution of 1848. After leaving what was then the highest legal office at the state level, he moved to the New York Supreme Court after passing his examination and entered into a law firm partnership with Ebenezer Griffin. At the age of 22 he married the then Elizabeth A. Jennings on February 1, 1837 in his hometown of New York City, with whom he would subsequently have seven descendants. One of them, George Henry Wheaton, would later fight in the American Civil War and achieve the rank of major. Most notably during the 1830s and 1840s, Wheaton was a practicing lawyer in New York and in 1842 was a member of the mayoral nomination committee of the Democratic Whig Party of the city's tenth constituency ( Tenth Ward ). In 1848 he was also a member of the Tenth Ward Committee in the nomination of the Whig Party candidate for the New York Congressional District 4.
In addition to his work as a lawyer, Wheaton was also active in sports, particularly baseball and cricket . So it was that, in 1845, Wheaton became a charter member and vice president of the New York Knickerbockers Baseball Club , one of the first organized baseball teams in history. That year he also served on the regulations and rules committee alongside William H. Tucker , both of whom were responsible for the club's baseball rules , which were officially introduced on September 23, 1845. He is said to have written the first set of rules for the Gotham Base Ball Club as early as 1837 . Although he in 1847 even for the Brooklyn Star Cricket Club and a year later for Eclipse played and other New York Cricket Club, it was surprising as Wheaton his city and his co-founded Sport Baseball turned his back in 1849 and the Gold Rush packed in Set off for California . On the three-masted Strafford he sailed with the New York Mining Company to San Francisco and left his wife and children behind in New York, which was not uncommon at the time. On February 1, 1849, Wheaton and around 100 other men from the mining company left the port of New York before arriving in San Francisco about six months later, on August 30, 1849. After he arrived in the settlement of Suttersville , now Sutter Creek, which had been founded a year earlier, he immediately went to Dry Town , which is today spelled Drytown, and began mining there.
After this business did not last long, Wheaton went to Sacramento , where he opened a trading business with Alonzo Hamilton under the name Hamilton & Wheaton . However, this partnership was dissolved after two years and Wheaton returned to San Francisco, where he continued his work in the same division and ran a store on Battery Street, near Jackson Street . After his final year in the trading business, he returned to his old job. In the winter of 1850/51 he traveled back to his old home in New York City, from where he returned to San Francisco almost two years later and opened a law firm on Montgomery Street . In 1852 his wife also came to San Francisco for a longer stay, leaving their children with Wheaton's parents in New York. Then William Wheaton practiced as a lawyer until 1855 before he returned to his homeland for a few months. Back in San Francisco in 1856, he was deeply involved with the San Francisco Committee of Vigilance , a vigilantism group disguised as a vigilante group trying to take the law into their own hands. Among other things, he also acted as an official in the Society of California Pioneers , founded in 1850 , where he is listed as a pioneer in August 1849 during the time of the gold rush. In 1860, when he was a lawyer on Washington Street, he was also to serve as a secretary for that organization. In 1857, William Wheaton was the aid-in-chief of a march organized to celebrate the Society of California Pioneers Admission Day . This march started on Market Street and ended at the American Theater on Sansome Street. For the organization, he also served as secretary to the management committee for meetings and assembly rooms.
From 1856 he appeared as secretary of the Pioneers chess club and wrote a report on a tournament for them, which was published on March 17, 1858 in the Daily Evening Bulletin , later the San Francisco Bulletin . In 1860 his wife Elizabeth and their four daughters settled permanently in San Francisco. George Henry Wheaton, who served in the Civil War as a judge-advocate, succeeded them after the war in 1865. Before that, William Wheaton was appointed City and County Assessor as a member of the People's Party in 1861 ; In 1863 he was re-elected. He was also elected in 1862 to represent the people of San Francisco in the California State Legislature . Other important offices he held in the subsequent period included chairing the Committee of the Political Code of the National Union Party , chairing the San Francisco delegation and chairing the Ways and Means Committee from 1871 to 1873 As chairman of the Ways and Means Committee , his primary responsibility was securing funding for the founding of the University of California, Berkeley . During this time he was chairman of the California Life Insurance Company in 1872 and was appointed as Register of the General Land Office of the United States by US President Ulysses S. Grant in 1876 . Four years later he was re-elected to that office by President Rutherford B. Hayes . Presidents James A. Garfield , who died months after taking office as a result of an assassination attempt, Chester A. Arthur and Grover Cleveland also retained Wheaton in this office, which means that he served in this position under five different US presidents within a few years. In 1886 Wheaton, now 72 years old, resigned from his position.
Around one and a half years after the Wheatons celebrated their golden wedding anniversary on February 1, 1887 , William Wheaton, a Freemason at California Lodge No. 1. and Knights Templar of the Knights Templar Odd Fellows Lodge No. 123 of St. Andrew's Benevolent Society on September 11, 1888 at the age of 74 in his adopted home of San Francisco, California.
A multitude of experts, including author and baseball historian Peter J. Nash, are campaigning for Wheaton's entry into the Baseball Hall of Fame . The author Paul Dickson states that Wheaton belongs to a group of men who should be considered the "fathers of baseball" and that this is not only thanks to Alexander Cartwright .
Web links
- William Wheaton on the official website of the Society of American Baseball Research
- How Baseball Began: William R. Wheaton Tells His Story - Interview with William Wheaton in the San Francisco Examiner, November 27, 1887 (English)
- William Wheaton in the book Base Ball Founders: The Clubs, Players and Cities of the Northeast That Established the Game (English)
Individual evidence
- ↑ "So, are there any Knickerbockers in that 1840's half-plate daguerreotype?" (PDF; English), accessed on October 22, 2015
- ↑ Wheaton marriage, death, and memberships . In: Society for American Baseball Research website . Accessed October 23, 2015.
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Wheaton, William |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Wheaton, William Rufus (full name) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American lawyer, politician, and baseball pioneer |
| DATE OF BIRTH | May 7, 1814 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | New York City , New York, United States |
| DATE OF DEATH | September 11, 1888 |
| Place of death | San Francisco , California, United States |